This CD-ROM offers unparalleled access to the world?s most important reference work for the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books

The text of this version is that of the second edition, 1989, and also includes the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series (Volumes 1?3), published in 1993 and 1997, and now almost 7,000 new words and meanings from the OED?s ongoing research programme.

Here is a summary of the main features of the new OED on CD-ROM:
? Quick search and easy-to-use navigation features
? Select how entries are displayed by turning pronunciations, etymologies, variant spellings, and quotations on and off
? Advanced searching to allow full exploitation of the data. You can look for quotations by date, author or work, search pronunciations, find words which have come into English from a particular language, etc.
? Automatic cross-referencing: click on any word in any entry to find it in the Dictionary
? Automatic look-up feature enabling fast access to OED headwords from other applications.